For my part I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it... is one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible & sociable millions of good fellows all taking a good long friendly snooze together, under the sod--no quarrels, no imaginary grievances, no envies, heart-burnings, & thinking how much better that other chap is off--none of this: but all equally free-&-easy, they sleep away & reel off their nine knots an hour, in perfect amity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

When her guests were awash with champagne and with gin,She was recklessly sober, as sharp as a pin....An abstemious man would reel at her look,As she rolled a bright eye and praised his last book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

To a traveler from the Old World, Canada East may appear like a new country, and its inhabitants like colonists, but to me, coming... from New England and being a very green traveler withal,... it appeared as old as Normandy itself, and realized much that I had heard of Europe and the Middle Ages. Even the names of humble Canadian villages affected me as if they had been those of the renowned cities of antiquity. To be told by a habitan, when I asked the name of a village in sight, that it is St. Féreol or St. Anne, the Guardian Angel or the Holy Joseph's; or of a mountain, that it was Bélange or St. Hyacinthe! As soon as you leave the States, these saintly names begin ... and thenceforward, the names of mountains, and streams, and villages reel, if I may so speak, with the intoxication of poetry,--Chambly, Longueuil, Pointe aux Trembles, Bartholomy, etc., etc.; as if it needed only a little foreign accent, a few more liquids and vowels perchance in the language, to make us locate our ideals at once. I began to dream of Provence and the Troubadours, and of places and things which have no existence on the earth. They veiled the Indian and the primitive forest, and the woods towards Hudson's Bay were only as the forests of Germany. I could not at once bring myself to believe that the inhabitants who pronounced daily those beautiful and, to me, significant names lead as prosaic lives as we of New England. In short, the Canada which I saw was not merely a place for railroads to terminate in and for criminals to run to.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

somewhere in sands of the desertA shape with lion body and the head of a man,...A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,Is moving its slow thighs, while all about itReel shadows of the indignant desert birds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

...there is a difference between being convinced and being stubborn. I'm not certain what the difference is, but I do know that if... you butt your head against a stone wall long enough, at some point you realize the wall is stone and that your head is flesh and blood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

My philosophy is that to be a director you cannot be subject to anyone, even the head of the studio. I threatened to quit each tim...e I didn't get my way, but no one ever let me walk out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I have a sense of going my own way, and I don't really think much about whether it's going against the grain. I don't really want ...to spend a lot of time worrying about how I am perceived by other people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »